


Other creatures that have eyes

by lotesse



Category: Battlestar Galactica (1978)
Genre: Apocalypse, Canon Character of Color, Chromatic Yuletide, Comrades in Arms, Dark Agenda, Destruction, Episode Related, F/M, First Kiss, Friendship, Gen, Loyalty, M/M, Outer Space, Stars, Survival, observation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-25
Updated: 2012-12-25
Packaged: 2017-11-21 16:23:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/599761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotesse/pseuds/lotesse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Boomer didn't often see the stars this way, although he flew among them daily; in a Viper space was segmented by tylinium plates and dark duralumin bars, broken into panes like oldfashioned glass windows.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Other creatures that have eyes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Capella](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Capella/gifts).



_1\. Saga of a Star World_

They were hanging by a thread, out there in the dark wastes between the stars. Nothing worked right anymore, not showers and not schools and not sex, because the world had suddenly grown narrow and small, the air a scarce commodity. You couldn't get away from a past in the fleet, because it was just too small; you couldn't keep class or even cultural divides intact, because everyone'd been thrown together and catastrophe tended to transform hearts; you couldn't waste time mourning or quarreling or sulking, because everyone was needed now, everyone's full strength and determination desperately necessary.

There had always been women in the Colonial Service – or, not always, Boomer thought, half-remembered Academy lectures on military history drifting across the surface of his consciousness without really impacting his thoughts, recollections of suffrage campaigns and early female Warriors – but those women tended to be of a certain class: the daughters of important men, like Adama's Athena or Commander Cain's girl, officers and ladies all. The sort of woman, holding the sort of position, who got her own quarters. The commsworkers and medtechs lived in staff quarters, where gender separation was common and established.

But wartime broke down barriers, and now the time of war was never going to end. The process of retreat was going to eat up all the time they had left, or so Boomer feared.

He himself was disused to privacy. There'd always been kids underfoot in his mama's house, back on warm humid dream-ridden Leo, either his brothers and sisters or their friends or other neighborhood strays. His mama had been a permissive, expansive woman, never one to care overmuch if the boys and girls under her roof got a little bit wild, so they'd all tended to end up there. And he'd left his mama's house for the Academy, lived in dormitories with dozens, hundreds, of other boys, gotten used to the smells of other people's bodies mixing with the cleaned and conditioned air. The _Galactica_ 's bachelor officer quarters were more cramped, more exposed, than the dormitories had been, but by the time he'd achieved his first space posting he'd grown so used to the shameless communalism of military life that he'd barely noticed the decreased privacy.

But this was war, and the aftermath of war. This was life as refugees. This was space, not as a posting, but as all that was left of home. Lords, twelve worlds, all slain and burning behind them. The first time he'd made liftoff he'd been eight, going to visit a school friend on Sagittera, and it's not a sight he'd ever forgotten: two planets, then three, then five, smaller and smaller to his sight, strung on their orbital paths like luminous gems against the dark star-studded skin of the void. His convoy had brought up the rear of the exodus, three sectars ago, and he'd turned to look back, more than half suspicious that the sight would turn him to salt or stone or a madman, but unable to resist. And they'd looked more like jewels than before, because each of the eight he could see had flared with destructive and uncheckable fire.

He'd seen some of the worst of the fleet overcrowding himself, trailing along in Apollo's wake, trying not to let the sharpness of his captain's tongue get to him – Apollo was carrying a lot, he knew, and there was a weird way that getting snapped at only demonstrated the depth of Apollo's faith in him, because it meant that he felt safe showing Boomer his real face instead of a grim or pleasant mask. It was pretty bad all 'round, worse than bad on some of the Gemonese and Caprican ships, those that had left from the largest population centers and were thus the most overburdened. Kids sleeping on piles of detritus, old men without water or warmth, families crying and dirty and angry and scared. All homeless, now.

So it didn't seem right to get too het up about living conditions on the _Galactica,_ because though it sure wasn't perfect it was better than almost anywhere else. They'd absorbed the extra warriors without too much trouble, the men and officers from the dead battlestars, but it had been strange, returning from his long illness to find the BOQ doubly overpopulated, and this time with the women who had stepped up to fill the places of the sick and convalescent. He'd listened to their battle on the medbay comm, and had nothing bad to say about either their valor or their capability – he'd been impressed, actually, as in his experience first-timers tended to be silly and overeager, and their group had handled themselves like seasoned campaigners. That little blonde, Bree, had squeaked like a spacehead, but he'd looked up her kill stats, and they were nothing to giggle at.

Starbuck, with his long experience of government institutionalization, had taken to the new living conditions with careless abandon, unselfconsciously inviting the girls into his bed, doctoring cigarettes for them with a total lack of concern. A number had taken him up on the invitation, too, and Boomer had heard their satisfaction whispering through the artificial darkness of shipnight. War bred closeness of all kinds: closeness of blood and bone and body, desire and release.

When Dietra came to his bunk, he wondered if he shouldn't give Starbuck's way a try, see if he couldn't screw away the sadness. But when she lay herself down next to him and said, low and soft and sweet as honey, “Not that, baby, I've just been lonesome for a homely voice,” he'd felt relief, mostly, and just a little bit of disappointment to lend it spice.

He rolled over as far as he could to give her space, and she hogged up three quarters of his bedding with a happy sigh. “Knew you'd be decent about it,” she said – and he could understand, then, why she'd come to him in the dark, because the familiar accent of her voice and cadence of her words was a sound and breath of home, and it felt good, good. Good and sweet and sad.

“I don't know how we're going to go on living like this,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Fracking Viper-jocks keep looking me over, I'm going to start putting out some eyes. It wouldn't be so bad if I could just get some felgered room to wash myself without getting checked out, or worse.”

He tensed. “Anyone laid hands on you without your permission? Or any of the other girls?”

Dietra sighed. “No, nothing that bad. I'd've reported that, of course I would. Just -” her voice quavered, broke, and steadied, and he admired the iron of her will - “just, it'd be real nice to get even a little bit of privacy, you know? Some solitude, a minute when a girl could think things through without being under eyes the whole time.”

She slept beside him that night, and although nothing racier happened he still felt soothed, purified, comforted by the heat of her body, the familiar scent of the jojoba oil in her hair.

The next morning he talked to Apollo, who talked to Tigh, and quarters ended up being re-partitioned that afternoon, blocking off a portion of the facilities solely for the women's use. Dietra came back to him the next night, and shared his bunk regular for a while after that. Just animal closeness, human communion to warm the dark intervals when the void outside the _Galactica_ 's hull seemed to press close, closer.

 

_2\. War of the Gods_

Boomer had come up to deliver the reports from the last recon mission he'd flown with Jolly, and it being the end of his duty shift had lingered there for a minute, just looking out at the expanse of space spreading out infinitely before them. He didn't often see the stars this way, although he flew among them daily; in a Viper space was segmented by tylinium plates and dark duralumin bars, broken into panes like oldfashioned glass windows. But here on the bridge the tylinium stretched wide, offering a panoramic look into nothing, nothing and weak starlight. It was a view that he found oddly compelling, but also somehow fundamentally terrifying. One of the reasons he wasn't ever likely to put in for bridge crew.

He leaned dizzy against the rail for a moment, until Athena's low and mellow voice said, “Are you all right?”

He looked down; she was sitting close by him at her console, the red-brown aureole of her hair gleaming with reflections of colored indicator lights. “Just looking at the stars.”

She laughed. “Fun, isn't it?” He only shook his head. After this last week, he was going to have a real hard time thinking of the stars as fun, or safe.

He'd danced with Athena, that night he'd been so drunk. He wished he could remember more of it than colored flashes and brief sensations.

The lift whooshed open the reveal Commander Adama, Colonel Tigh in tow. Tigh was speaking, but Boomer couldn't make out the words. The two men climbed the steps to the command dais, approaching closer to where Boomer clung.

He was never sure, when Commander Adama let himself be overheard in this way, if the man meant to do it or not.

“At least tell me that the advances in the recovery of the agro-ship output haven't been lost.” Adama's voice was heavy, tired – almost, Boomer thought with an inward shudder, he sounded - shamed.

“We haven't lost everything, Adama, but the rapid rates of growth and reproduction we saw during Iblis' – visit – haven't continued. We're back to the usual slow crawl, I'm afraid.”

“Lords,” Adama said, covering his face with his hand and then drawing it slowly down.

It was a thing beyond fathoming that Adama not to be completely deliberate, controlled, and aware in his every slightest action. When Boomer had first started "overhearing" these sorts of briefings and conversations among the command staff, he'd wondered if Adama might just not give a frack about military secrecy anymore. Maybe the post-Destruction lack of privacy had gotten to the man, maybe it didn't seem worth working to preserve that aspect of the chain of command. But then he'd realized that no one else in the Officer's Club seemed to have his level of access to that overheard inside track. Which meant that the steady rivulet of command information that had been flowing down to him was a targeted stream, undammed knowingly and with intent.

And that made a lot more sense, really, because Boomer knew, he knew, that in ordinary circumstances he would've been given his captaincy by now, would have his own sub-command. He did a hell of a lot more on the _Galactica_ than the work of a pilot. But since the only path to promotion now involved the funeral of someone above you – and since the person directly above him was Apollo - and since he had no intention of attending Apollo's funeral, if only to avoid the wretched dramatics that Starbuck would put everyone through in that circumstance – well, it was hard to complain too much. Better to stay a lieutenant than to bury another brother.

He'd been standing as Apollo's unofficial second for a while now. Starbuck was the best of the pilots, technically speaking, but he was flightly and had authority issues. Boomer was the steady one, and he was the one Apollo delegated to first and counted on. And apparently Commander Adama knew that, because he had quietly extended to Boomer the kind of access to command information that only Apollo and Tigh, his Third and his Second, were granted.

It certainly made everyone's lives easier. Boomer could lay groundwork for Apollo, keep morale up and gossip light; already he was flashing through the implications of what he was catching from his commander, thinking about how to keep the OC from grousing too much about the short rationing that was surely approaching. Make a joke out of it: these rations are so bad I'd rather swallow my spit, time to sober up, boys and girls, no more nectar benders for a while.

Down along the curve of the railing, Adama rested his weight on his wrists, looking blindly forward. “Tigh,” he said, sounding old and breathless, “I'm afraid I've rather made a mess of things.”

“It wasn't your fault,” Tigh said, laying an arm along the Commander's shoulder. Boomer gulped at the liberty; he couldn't imagine ever daring to touch Adama's body, be the man his good buddy's dad or not.

“How can I ask them to follow me, after this?”

“After they let themselves be taken in by a conjob and a seducer, you mean? And you did your best to save them, and succeeded? After that?”

“Yes, and left us drifting with insufficient food and dashed hopes.”

Something about the set of Adama's shoulders, tensed and hurt, pulled at him. It reminded Boomer irresistably of Apollo in his depressive-perfectionist moods, and before he'd really thought it through he'd drifted closer to the two officers, going down along the railing.

“Sir,” he said, almost swallowing his tongue with last-minute nerves, “if I may speak plainly?”

Adama raised a sardonic, still-dark eyebrow. “Please, Lieutenant.”

“Sir, I think you'll find that the Warriors, at least, are all pretty ashamed of the way they behaved around Count Iblis. Myself included in that number, sir – we slept through a red alert, sir, and that's conduct unbecoming a defender of the Colonies. Of the fleet, that is. Iblis' offers we never genuine, so you've taken nothing from us by refusing them.”

Tigh gave Boomer a tight smile. “He's right, you know,” Tigh said. “And where the Warriors lead, public opinion almost always follows.”

“You don't think there will be grumbling?”

Not sure if the question was directed at him, Boomer nevertheless answered it. “Very likely there will be, if only from the idiots and the fools. We can't escape that. But the decent people in this fleet will realize that there's more than enough fault to go around in the matter, and won't give you more than your fair share.”

Adama raised one hand, bringing it down to rest heavy on Boomer's shoulder. “Nor you, Lieutenant.”

“Sir, I feel I ought to confess – I let Iblis into my heart, willingly, because I wanted to beat Captain Apollo and Lieutenant Starbuck at Triad. I gave him my permission. And I -”

But Adama was shaking his head. “There's no need for that, Boomer,” he said, very gently, very soft. “We have plenty of sins to go around; best forgiven and forgotten.”

Tigh had been standing quietly, looking out through the tylinium shield into the black. “Anyway,” he said, also softly, “who's to say our hopes are dashed? That boy of yours was reciting some pretty interesting numbers, Adama.”

Boomer knew about that – Starbuck had spilled his guts on the whole thing, and in between wild accounts of death and resurrection he'd kept circling round to these numbers. Starbuck and Sheba and Apollo: there was a course mapped out in their minds, numbers charting a path through the stars. Something about the idea made the void space around them seem warmer, tamer, more comprehensible, changing it from the kind of infinite expanse that made a person's head ache to a dark and starlit sea, navigable, with a destination port ahead.

“Do you think that will help?” Adama asked him in a low rumble, and Boomer could only nod in silence and gaze out at the stars.

 

_3\. The Hand of God_

They'd always been a trio, he and Apollo and Starbuck, all the way back to their assignments to the _Galactica_. But while they'd once been three of a kind, now they formed a triangle: a place for each man, and each in his place. Boomer's was to be steady and smart and trustworthy. He'd done the reading on group dynamics, understood the interplay of personalities and behaviors that kept them functioning: Apollo the superego and Starbuck the id and Boomer the balance, the safe space, the fixed point. His was the least glamorous point of the triad, but given the stakes he'd found it pretty hard to care. If he and Apollo and Starbuck had to triangulate to keep going, well, they were needed.

He'd thought his heart was going to crawl up his throat and out between his teeth when they hadn't reported in after the stupid stunt they'd pulled, going in under cover after that base star. If they were going to recklessly endanger themselves sneaking around Cylons and dumping their specially-calibrated electronics equipment, the least they could do would be to bring him along so as to keep him from worrying.

In the subsequent celebration, Apollo had been nowhere to be found. But he'd given away his Celestial hidey-hole to his friends, and it was widely known that even one time was as a good as a pattern with the captain, and it wasn't hard to predict where he'd probably be. Boomer thought briefly about agitating for the right to go reclaim Apollo for the party himself – he really wanted to see that Dome. Those recordings Apollo had brought down were fascinating; he didn't share Apollo's romantic streak, but sure he did share his attraction to old and strange technologies.

But Starbuck had practically been trembling with the desire to be off, his emotional intensity flaring around him in a corona, and after a minute of teasing torture Boomer relented and sent him off. He'd never seen anyone move as fast as Starbuck did when he was going after Apollo; his feet might have had wings, he was gone so soon.

Nursing his liquor, Boomer looked out over his people, celebrating, victorious. Sheba was sitting with Bojay, laughing in well-worn safe cameraderie; Omega was gesticulating enthusiatically at Greenbean; Dietra was dealing a pyramid hand in a back corner.

Athena sat alone, her auburn hair wrapped around her like a cloak, or a shield. Boomer remembered her face, streaked with carbon and sweat and dirt; he'd thought he was going to die beside her, and he'd thought how lovely and fierce and wild she'd looked. He thought again of Apollo's Celestial Dome, wondered what Athena would look like under the opened tylinium flower, her face upturned to the expanse of the stars. From what Starbuck had said, Apollo had been quite a sight by all that starlight – but then, Starbuck's descriptions of Apollo's charms tended to read as overstatement to everyone else, and always had.

He'd bet all the credits in his store that Athena would look like a queen of the ancient world by starlight. She wasn't pretty the same way her big brother was, with his wide green eyes and shy smile. No, Athena's beauty was regal, and sharp-edged. He could see why Starbuck had made such a fool of himself over her, clinging to the relationship even after he'd been ready to move on. Starbuck, who wanted everything and nothing, who'd two-timed Athena for Cass and then left them both at a crook of Apollo's finger.

Dropping down into the seat beside her, he said, “Do you ever get the feeling they're going to drive you mad?”

She turned and smiled a polite cool smile of incomprehension. “Who do you mean?”

“Starbuck. Your brother. Hells, I don't know.”

He hadn't meant – it wasn't what he'd meant to say, when he'd gotten her alone. He'd meant to be smooth and suave and seductive, romantic and flirtatious and instead he was using her as a shoulder to cry on.

But her smile turned real, turned wry, and she turned her body so that she was open to him. “Their little game of musical lovers? I try not to let it get to me.”

“I thought – you let Starbuck get away with kind of a lot.” Frack, frack, frack, these were not the things he was supposed to be saying to her, not now.

She wound her fingers around the stem of her glass, lowering her eyes for a moment. Then she looked back up, and met his. “Did you know that I asked him to seal with me, right after the Destruction?” Mutely, he shook his head, and she went on: “It was a stupid thing to do. We would've driven each other crazy – and besides, I don't even really want to be sealed right now. It would be – constricting. But – everything changed so fast, after. I'd always had a place clearly marked out for me, and then suddenly all the old barriers and paths were gone, and space seemed so big and open. If we didn't have ships, or suits, the vacuum out there would pull our bodies to pieces, and even though I was on a ship I still felt like that was happening to me. Like I was being pulled apart, all my empty spaces exposed. So I proposed to Starbuck.”

Tentative, Boomer ventured, “You're not sorry, then, that you broke with him?”

Her smile grew even more wry, turning up sarcastically at the corners of her mouth. “And miss the spectacle that would be Starbuck neglecting his wife to make eyes at his brother-in-law? Not likely! Cassiopeia can have that, and welcome to it.”

There was something bitter in her tone, something that he wanted to smooth away. “He wouldn't have – not with -”

But she cut him off. “You're supposed to be the sensible one, Boomer. Do you really think he would have been faithful to me, in body or in heart?”

He sighed, and shook his head. “He never has been before, so no, probably not. But he's a fool, and an ass.”

She laughed, like the pealing of carillon bells. “Let him be. I don't – maybe you'll understand this, you're a pilot.”

He gestured her on; he was listening.

“That feeling I was telling you about, that things were too open? I don't feel that way anymore. Instead it all feels, I don't know, somehow glorious. Look at us, Boomer – we're doing something humanity hasn't done for centuries. We're breaking uncharted space. There's nothing left to constrain us, to channel us into set and worn old ways.”

“I'd never thought of it that way. The space around here always feels to me like it's pressing in on us. Claustrophobic, like. We're in a little metal box, and we can't leave it.”

“But that's only literal. Think how many, oh, I don't know, social boxes, we've left burning in our wake.”

He counted them off in his mind: completely mixed and integrated service, racially- and culturally-mixed sealings clogging the registers, the chance to retrain, to explore, to whisper in the dark. To disregard, even just a little bit, the chain of command. He'd never thought of it like that, maybe because he'd always relied on his ability to play the parts the system asked of him to survive. Good Boomer, steady Boomer, reliable and obedient, observing everything but saying nothing. It took Athena, glittering and privileged and yes, in her word, constrained, to find the silver lining of the clouds of smoke and dust that represented the loss of their worlds.

“I only wish,” she said, softer now, and more melancholy, “that Mama and Zac could have seen it, too. Mama would have -”

Her voice broke; he reached up a hand and buried it in her dark hair, touching her cheek in caress and comfort.

“So,” he said, backing them down from that precipice of grief, “no sealing with Starbuck, then?”

She looked up at him with luminous eyes. “Starbuck was never going to be loyal to me.”

Somehow feeling that he ought to defend the man – they were friends, after all, even if Starbuck's waffling was about to drive Boomer mad – he put in for him, “He's loyal, though, when it really comes down to it.”

“To Apollo, yes,” she said, and wasn't that the answer to all of it? Then she shook her hair back, lifting her chin, and a glint and spark of determination lit her wide dark eyes. “I was a child when the world ended, Boomer, I really was. A silly little girl who thought about rivalries and winning, who thought that sexual conquest was some real form of power. I've learned better since. And – it sounds horrible to say this, but I'm going to anyway – there's a way that I'm not sorry to have had this chance to grow up. Do you know what I mean?”

“I do now,” he said, and leaned in, and kissed her nectar-sweet mouth, there in the middle of the OC. Jolly clapped and hooted, and Boomer winced; he'd hear plenty about this in the morning.

“Never mind them,” Athena said, tossing her head with the doubled assurance of a woman both highborn and secure in her own power. “I've found that strength and stability often go hand in hand – and strength, Lieutenant, is an aphrodisiac.”

She rose and went on graceful feet, leaving him behind to daydream about the open spaces between the stars.


End file.
